Georgi Koskov

Georgi Koskov (born 5 December 1944) is a former general of the Soviet Union who was a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan War. He was known for his plot to sell opium to fund the Soviet forces fighting the Mujahideen there in the 1980s.

Biography
Koskov was born in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Cold War, Koskov became a general but eventually had a change of heart and planned to defect to the United Kingdom in 1987 while at a concert hall in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Covered by MI6, he escaped KGB assassins and was smuggled from Austria and on to Britain.

He revealed that the SMERSH initiative to kill all foreign spies was reactivated under General Leonid Pushkin, the new KGB leader, but was kidnapped from the safehouse and presumably taken back to Moscow. But the MI6 found out that his defection was staged and he was making an arms deal with Brad Whitaker in Tangier, Morocco, and tracked him down to Afghanistan, where he planned to capture opium that he could trade for weaponry for Soviet troops.

Eventually, he was stopped by MI6, who collaborated with the Mujahideen and destroyed his opium plane. General Pushkin arrested him for embezzlement of government money and sent him back to Moscow, and he was jailed in a gulag from then onwards.